The xebec: the corsair ship of the Mediterranean

What is a xebec?

A xebec (say “ZEE-beck”) was a sailing ship of the Mediterranean Sea. The French called it a chebec and the Spanish a jabeque, and the word itself comes from Arabic. It probably grew out of older North African boats in the 1600s, and by the 1700s it was a well-known type all along the coasts of Barbary (North Africa), Spain and Portugal.

A xebec was long and narrow, sat low in the water, and had a pointed, beak-like bow that jutted forward and a stern that jutted out behind. Under the water the hull was slim, for speed; at deck level it was wider, so it could carry a great spread of sail.

How did a xebec sail?

Most 18th-century xebecs had three masts carrying lateen sails. A lateen sail is a big triangle hung from a long yard that slants across the mast, one end low near the deck and the other high in the air. Unlike the square sails of an ocean-going frigate, lateen sails let a ship sail fairly close to the wind, which helped in the light, shifting breezes of the Mediterranean, whether chasing or escaping. Early xebecs had only two masts, and by the middle of the century many could also set square sails when the wind was behind them.

When the wind died, the crew could row. Ten to twenty long oars could keep a xebec moving in a calm, when a heavy merchant ship lay helpless. That was its great advantage. A xebec was not a slave galley, though: it was mainly a sailing ship and needed far fewer rowers.

There were drawbacks. Xebecs were lightly built and low-sided, so they were poor in heavy seas and could not stand up to a strong warship’s guns. Their sails also took many hands. The naval writer William Falconer, in his 1769 dictionary of the sea, said an Algerine captain told him a xebec needed as much work as three square-rigged ships.

Who were the Barbary corsairs?

“Barbary” was the European name for the coast of North Africa. Around 1715 three corsair ports there, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, were self-governing regencies (states run by local rulers) that owed loyalty to the Ottoman sultan. Morocco, further west, was an independent kingdom, and its Atlantic port of Salé was famous for its sea raiders, the “Salé rovers”.

A corsair was a raider licensed by his own government, a little like a privateer (a privately owned ship given a government licence to attack enemy ships). Corsairs shared their prizes with their rulers and attacked ships of nations that had no peace treaty with them. That made them different from the Caribbean pirates of the same years, such as Blackbeard, who had no government behind them and were outlaws everywhere.

Corsairs did not usually want to sink ships. They aimed to frighten a merchant crew into giving up, often keeping most of their men out of sight until they were close. A xebec’s huge crew made that easy: 18th-century writers say Algerine war xebecs carried 300 to 450 men, about two-thirds of them soldiers, and 16 to 24 cannon.

Did corsairs really sail xebecs around 1715?

Yes, but not only xebecs. In the 1500s Barbary raiders rowed galleys. In the early 1600s European renegades taught them to sail big square-rigged ships, which carried their raids out into the Atlantic and as far as the English Channel. Historians say the Algiers fleet of the 1700s was made up mostly of xebecs, but it is hard to say exactly how common they were by 1715, and corsairs also used square-rigged ships, polaccas (another Mediterranean type) and captured European vessels.

Salé was different. A shifting sandbar blocked the mouth of its river, so only shallow ships could get in. Its rovers mostly sailed small square-rigged ships suited to the Atlantic.

What happened to the sailors corsairs captured?

For corsairs, people were often worth more than cargo. Captured sailors and passengers were held for ransom or sold as slaves. Writers at the time estimated that Algiers held roughly 8,000 to 10,000 captives in 1700, and about the same in 1729. Many worked in households, on building sites or in quarries. Many were eventually ransomed, through merchants, consuls or Catholic religious orders that collected money to buy them back, but many others never were. Historians still disagree about how many went home.

One British boy’s story survives in his own words. Thomas Pellow, aged eleven, was taken from his uncle’s small Cornish ship in 1715 or 1716 and carried to Morocco, where he served the powerful Sultan Moulay Ismail. He converted to Islam, which meant he could not be ransomed, and only escaped in 1737, reaching home in 1738, after 23 years.

Enslavement in the Mediterranean ran both ways. Christian states such as Spain, the Italian states and Malta also enslaved Muslims, and they were rarely ransomed. The historian Robert Davis has estimated that over a million people were taken on each side between 1500 and 1800. These are careful estimates rather than counts, and other historians debate them.

What was a Mediterranean pass?

Under Britain’s treaties with Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, the Admiralty issued passes to qualifying British ships from 1662. The top of each pass was cut off along a wavy, scalloped line, and the matching tops went to North Africa. A corsair who stopped a ship could fit the two edges together: if they matched, she was British and should go free. Passes were sometimes misused or sold to foreign ships, especially later in the 1700s, and the Dutch copied the idea in 1712.

Morocco had no such treaty. In 1720 Britain sent Commodore Charles Stewart with a squadron against the Salé rovers and to make peace. A treaty followed in January 1721, and that July the sultan released 296 English captives at Meknes.

Did European navies use xebecs?

Yes, but mostly after the 1720s. To catch corsairs on their own terms, France built its own chebecs from about 1750, and from the 1750s Spain kept flotillas of jabeques, based at Cartagena, to hunt corsairs along its coasts. The most famous fight came much later, in 1801, when Lord Cochrane’s little British brig Speedy captured the much larger Spanish xebec-frigate El Gamo. Compared with the single-masted Bermuda sloop that Caribbean pirates loved, the xebec was bigger, more crowded and built for the narrow sea and its calms.